For years I have been susceptible to bouts of vertigo. My toes skid over the lip of a stair, or I take a too-quick glance over a high ledge, or the face of a friend contorts during an ordinary conversation into an expression of sudden emotion — and my sense of balance is gone. The vertigo comes and goes quickly. I’ve learned to respond to its presence with jaw-tight stillness rather than flailing arms and dramatic pratfalls. But the sense never leaves me that I might pitch at any moment into a chasm at the heart of reality. Reading László Földényi’s essay collection (translated by Ottilie Mulzet) is the literary analog to this experience. His essays are vertiginous.
For example, in one essay he describes an incident with his small son, who is not yet old enough to speak. The boy sees a dog and is scared. Földényi picks him up and looks into his eyes. Whoosh — the essay’s floor drops out from under us:
As I gazed into his eyes, I discovered a depth within them that truly shocked me. The anchors of fear are cast deep into a place where words never penetrate. […] We have a great need of words: they put distance between ourselves and the object of our fear. They cover something over, and in doing so make life more bearable — they help us when we are stuck. For a small child, however, this veil of words does not function in the same way. […] And when such a child begins to fear his gaze penetrates everything, like a lead ball being dropped into a bottomless well. […] He does not simply see a dog from which he wants to hide. Instead, total untrustworthiness has opened up before him, embodied by the dog. In that moment there is nothing to which he could entrust himself. This experience could be something like what the gnostics of old used to call being cast into existence. That is what made the child’s fear so vertiginous — and the child’s gaze even made me dizzy: I was able to glimpse into something that otherwise I would never wish to perceive.
Földényi’s book amounts to a hunt for moments like this. It is miscellaneous and multi-disciplinary (he is officially a Hungarian professor of aesthetics), full of ekphrasis and anecdote, philosophical thesis and historical detail. It ranges from an exposition of Artaud’s theater of cruelty, to theories about fear and melancholy, to a discussion of famous suicides, to a philosophy of dreams. On the surface, in other words, it has the randomness of a hodgepodge essay collection; but beneath the surface, it is single-minded in its pursuit of a certain category of insight.
What do fear, melancholy, the theater of cruelty, literary suicide, and dreams have in common? According to Földényi, they are experiences that point us toward “atheistic religiosities.” They belong to a group of everyday reminders of our animal nature, but through the very fact of that reminding they put us in touch with what is unique about our humanity: “a sense for metaphysics.”
In Földényi’s view, modern culture has lost sight of the “sense for metaphysics” because it abolished such things in the process of rejecting religious belief systems. He does not want to re-enchant the world as some do, does not seek some kind of return to a pre-Enlightenment worldview, but he does want to draw our attention to an aspect of human existence that goes unaddressed by our arts and sciences while nonetheless riddling our daily lives and cultural environment with moments of vertigo.
It’s hard to sum up what he means by the “sense for metaphysics.” He defines it—foggily—in his introduction as “the sense for the uniquess of our life, for the exceptionality of our existence within this universe, for the great wonder of the incomparability and unrepeatability of each moment of every one of our lives.” But this tissue of abstractions didn’t resolve into clarity for me until halfway through the book. I suppose that’s why he required an essay collection to make his point. This is how I would define his “sense of metaphysics” in my own words: it is the capacity to pay attention to the moments in our lives when we remember that we are mortal bodies, made of the same stuff as the rest of the world. For example “if someone is afraid,” Földényi writes in the essay touching upon his son, “it does not matter if he or she is living in the twenty-first century, suddenly that person will be akin to an animal.”
If feeling fear is an example of the “sense for metaphysics” how can we be said to have lost this sense? Surely everybody is sometimes afraid. But Földényi’s point is that most of the time most modern adult humans don’t feel sensations like fear, not nakedly, not directly. We suppress fear with words. That’s why he needs to see it in the eyes of his young, wordless child to recognize it for what it is. We have systematically blunted the edge of the vertiginous experiences that remind us of the true nature of our existence.
Take melancholy, another emotion Földényi considers to be salient to a sense of metaphysics. His grasp on the cultural history of melancholy is prodigious, and in fact one of his other books that has been translated into English is a history of melancholy. For much of that history, melancholy was a mysterious but not necessarily pathological condition, commonly associated with greatness and creativity. This is because, according to Földényi, melancholy is intimately related to his “sense of metaphysics:”
In our melancholia and desire for happiness, the experience of our own vulnerability to mortality and death will become perceptible. Herein is offered a kind of metaphysical initiation.
Now, however, we don’t talk about melancholy. Beginning around the enlightenment (like so many of Földényi’s tales of decline), the concept contracted in scope and eventually became entirely subsumed under the pathologized and medicalized concept of depression:
Melancholy — which, throughout two and a half millenia of European history was one of the most prominent manifestations of the human condition, and frequently held to be the sign of increased health — began at the beginning of the nineteenth century to fall away from the field of vision. That which was considered by Aristotle a trait of the greatest intellects was suddenly restricted to a kind of sentimnetal mawkishness, a kind of kitschy “sense of the beautiful,” permitted only on beautiful autumn evenings, at sunset, or during lachrymose films; otherwise it was something to be smiled at. And if, here or there, melancholy has still somehow managed to stubbornly persist, and the one who has been touched by melancholy is not inclined to free himself from this state, then that person is quickly introduced to the interventions of medical science so that the “happiness” of his “normal” course of life may be restored — although in this case, one speaks not of melancholy but rather of depression, which is a straightforward state of illness and as such can be ameliorated with the help of pharmaceuticals.
Many of the essays, when they are not opening windows onto the vertigo of everyday experience, seek the causes for our cultural desensitization. For instance, Földényi discusses the cultural history of politeness by examining the once famous letters of Lord Chesterfield to his illegitimate son. This 18th century moralist bombarded his child with epistles full of instructions about how to behave, insisting always upon restraint, quelling natural impulses, disciplining the body. These letters mark, for Földényi, a culture-wide turn toward a preference for unnatural, un-animal behavior, and he darkly (and somewhat dubiously) connects it to contemporaneous obsessions with dismemberment and torture. His specific claims about historical causation seem tendentious, but the overall point — that a feature of modernity is a deliberate blunting of our ability to appreciate the true nature of our embodied existence — is unsettlingly convincing. His essays would not themselves be full of vertiginous experiences for me if my sense of metaphysics had not previously been blunted.
But what’s so bad about that? Why on earth would we want to be more nakedly exposed to fear and melancholy, more constantly and vividly aware of our bodies and impending mortality? In the last few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has provoked a global sense of vertigo as the fragility of our lives and of our economic order comes suddenly, dreadfully into view. Few people with a modicum of awareness in our society have not been oppressed by a “sense of metaphysics” lately. Who wants that?
Földényi’s answer is simple: blinding ourselves to the true nature of human existence only prevents us from coping with it. He makes this point most vividly in the essay after which the book is named, “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Burst Into Tears.” He paints a (speculative) scene for us of Dostoyevsky, newly condemned to the prison wastes of Siberia, reading Hegel’s then popular lectures on the philosophy of history. In the beginning of those lectures, Hegel rules out all the parts of the globe that make him uncomfortable (such as the whole continent of Africa and backwaters like Siberia) and defines history so that it only includes the story of rational development he wants to tell. History, Hegel averred, could not come out of Siberia. Földényi asks us to imagine Dostoyevsky, the aspiring writer, learning in consternation that he now belongs to a part of the world outside history, that he has been cast out from history. But of course, for Dostoyevsky it was the experience of Siberia, the suffering he knew and saw, that transformed him into a great novelists. History did come out of Siberia. If we choose to blunt the “sense of metaphysics” or consent to the rationalization of our culture, Földényi suggests, we are just as likely as Hegel to be ludicrously wrong about our world, about what it contains and where it is going.
The present state of our own societies, suspended and terrorized by a pandemic (about which, of course, Földényi knew nothing when he wrote these essays) aptly speaks to his thesis. Our collectively renewed sense of metaphysics should fill us with regret that we took for granted our animal vulnerability, failed to prepare for what now threatens our bodies, and refused to acknowledge the traumas of poverty, hunger, and homelessness until we were exposed to them ourselves. Perhaps a stronger sense of metaphysics could induce us to create a better and more humane political order. Perhaps László Földényi’s ten year old essay collection is arriving in our language at just the right time.
[Published by Yale University Press on February 18, 2020, 304 pages, $26.00. An edition of the Margellos World Republic of Letters Series]